This article reflects my personal experience to make Google Apps, especially Google Mail work on my client’s website. I will discuss my experience about my old MTA, SpamAssassin, Bayes Algorithm, problems and my decision to switch to Google Apps.
Each day, my client received around 100 spam emails. I enabled the SpamAssassin in the mail server and that tagged most of the emails as spams the first day. As days went buy, I realized that all the email add of spammers had changed. So, I decided to train the Spam Assassin (Bayes Algorithm). At some point, that failed too. I was looking for a solution where I could filter out spams in a different inbox, and still have a look at them once a day. The competitive solution costs around $4,000. So we decided to move to Google Apps.
The first problem was that I made all the changes as suggested by Google in my DNS (mx settings). That solved the problem for a little bit, but I saw my redirected emails (email groups) being delivered to the old mail server. Google had a bunch of settings that I had to put differently in order to make it work. On server management side, I am running Plesk 7.5. From its interface, I changed the new MX emails for my server.
The most important process was to get all the client’s emails from the old MTA to the new inbox in Google. I went to the Google Mail settings and put the smtp server for my old MTA with a slightly different change:
For instance, instead of email@domain.com, I put email@test.domain.com. Using the same credentials however, I was able to fetch all the emails from the old server to the new inbox.
The second important thing was to make the form mails to work. After everything worked, the form mail in the website was still mailing the old mail server instead of the new one. This happened because the website was using the sendmail to send the email. The last step was to turn the old MTA off. That made everything working.
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